


Tell a Clear Story with a Forked Tongue

by innie



Category: Knives Out (2019)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:13:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26567878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: After it's all over, Marta figures out what's next.
Relationships: Benoit Blanc & Marta Cabrera, Marta Cabrera & Alice Cabrera, Marta Cabrera & Harlan Thrombey, Marta Cabrera & Mrs. Cabrera
Comments: 22
Kudos: 67
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	Tell a Clear Story with a Forked Tongue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Morbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/gifts).



> Written for the amazing Morbane, who bid on me in Fandom Trumps Hate and thereby continued the excellent conversation we'd been having.
> 
> (Title from a line in the movie, which was an absolute delight.)

"There are rules for writing detective fiction, of course, as there are rules for anything worth doing, but the greats have broken nearly all of them and produced some of the undisputed classics of the field. _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_ , for example — the narrator is the killer, and uses the epilogue to publish his own suicide note."

Harlan was on something of a roll; it sounded like he knew what he wanted to say when he addressed the Mystery Writers' Guild at their year-end gala. "Mm-hmm," she said, her fingers on his pulse while she dug the sphygmomanometer out of her bag and put it on the table next to the teapot and her stethoscope.

"Hello, Figgy," Harlan said. He'd told her once that her face was a perfect reflection of her thoughts and feelings, so she knew she didn't have to put on a questioning expression to get him to explain himself. "Short for that blasted device," he said, gesturing with mock indignation that gave way to a grin; he was pleased with his own cleverness. He had every right to be, going by how each new book, every six months like clockwork, started at the top of the bestseller list and stayed there, comfortable on its perch. "Also short for _figment of my imagination_ , which is how I choose to regard that thing from now on."

"But it is not Figgy who is telling you to keep quiet and take nice, deep breaths."

"I don't _want_ to ignore you, my dear. You are my captive audience."

"Harlan," she said, taking his arm. "Hush." His BP was where it had been yesterday, on the high side but not landing him in the danger zone. He must have seen the all-clear on her face, because he smiled triumphantly and continued his lecture.

"What all that guff about following the rules unless you're one of the greats — in which case it's unlikely that you're sitting here, listening to me pontificate, in the hope of gleaning some tips — boils down to is that there's really only one fundamental rule that is absolutely unbreakable in a mystery novel —" 

She smiled; Harlan did love his dramatic pauses. "There has to be a mystery to solve?" she guessed, pouring out more tea for both of them. Harlan was bad about remembering to hydrate, and this herbal tea was more palatable to him than anything else she'd found. The color of it must have appealed to him too, red like the inside of a perfect plum.

He laughed. "That's almost too fundamental — I'm talking about laying the stones and you're in the back yard, digging graves." After so many decades in the genre, such morbid metaphors sprang most readily to his mind, she supposed; he'd call the tea blood-red. The big, weathered canvas of his face went from amused to thoughtful. "Though this is fundamental to your very life, I suppose; you of all people would never need this spelled out if you turned your hand to my profession. It is simply this: you _must_ play fair with your audience."

She smiled at him, overcome by a wave of affection for this old man who treated her like family without saying a word about it.

*

Harlan had not played fair with her, in the end. 

The grandson he'd seemed to love, or at least prize above the rest of his descendants, was a rampaging monster, heedless of the people he hurt in his quest to claim the inheritance he'd always assumed was his. And Harlan had not tipped her off; Harlan had lulled her into a false sense of security by saying _there's so much of me in that kid_. She'd _believed_ Ransom, trusted him when he said he was mourning his grandfather, and all the while he'd been setting her up to take the fall for him, licking his chops at the thought of fucking her over.

She wraps her hands around the mug of café con leche Mamá made her and looks up at the portrait of Harlan. Alice can shut up about how "creepy" it is, because Marta has no intention of taking it down. Only now she can kind of see Alice's point, because his painted smile isn't as broad as she remembers and there's a sorrowful look in his eyes.

Her phone buzzes then, making her jump and nearly making her spill her coffee, but she saves it at the last moment. It's a text from one of the security guards out front, giving her the name of the visitor who's pulled up in a car she wouldn't be able to pick out from a line-up. It's Mamá's immigration lawyer, a woman who had done some research before reaching out. How was it that out of the hundreds of lawyers who'd pitched their services, Amália was the only one who'd bothered to check what had happened to Papá, verifying that he'd died in a construction accident on an unsafe site, and that he hadn't willingly abandoned them? That wasn't even about work ethic, like Alice liked to grumble, just common decency.

Marta texts the guard back to let the visitor in and climbs the creaky stairs to Harlan's study, feeling at least a hundred years old. She can stay out of Amália's way up here, surrounded by the books that Harlan read and wrote, nestled into his beautiful wing chair. Her hand drops automatically, reverent fingertips caressing the Go stones like they are the only things that can possibly be real; her blacks are familiar to her touch but Harlan's customary whites have an alien hum to them. She doesn't have to wonder which color Ransom would have played.

*

She's going out of her mind, ensconced in this house built on murder. 

Actually, that's not strictly true; she remembers Blanc saying that a Pakistani real-estate mogul owned it before Harlan took a liking to it. But Mr. Bukhari had had it constructed based on what he could glean from _Around the Corner and Down the Lane_ , the first of Harlan's country-house murder mysteries, and Harlan had laughed when he told her of the house's provenance and said it just went to show how much of a narcissist he was, that he had to buy the thing that had sprung from his brain. 

"There was more to the construction than just _springing_ , I assume," she'd responded, half her mind still on the argument Mamá and Alice had had that morning, centering on the difference between a job to pay the bills and a career to be proud of. She'd been tart enough — construction projects always made her a little apprehensive, and she was more than a little embarrassed by the transparency of her psychological trauma — that he huffed out a laugh.

"Trust you not to see how Jovian I truly am," Harlan had said, with a grand gesture, and she had had to smile.

He really had a magnificent face, she'd seen then. If he'd allowed adaptations of his work, he could have played one of his own detectives and given the audience the sort of shrewd and discerning investigator only he seemed capable of writing these days.

"Jovian even in my fickleness," he responded on another occasion when she'd asked why he didn't make a proper series of his works, a steady detective whose character his readers could get to know book after book. "I'd get bored of any smug little know-it-all, I'd want him to be outwitted at some point, and that's the one thing — look, you've made me come up with another unbreakable rule, and this talk I'm giving on How To Write Murder Mysteries is getting awfully convoluted — that an author must never allow. Good _has_ to win the day, even if the victory is pyrrhic." He pushed away the tiered stand that held elementary-school shapes: the ovals of deviled eggs, the prim rectangles of crustless cucumber-sandwich fingers, and the triangles of pear-and-walnut tart slices; it was the third stand that had made an appearance since Harlan had decided he felt like snacking rather than dining that day. 

She swallowed the last bite of her sandwich spear, savoring the flavors, and held up the deck of cards. At his nod she pulled out the unnecessary cards to make a forty-card deck, shuffled, and dealt for brisca. She'd never played so many games before working for Harlan — Mamá was a poor teacher, impatient and seeming to remember rules only after others broke them, while Alice played with the devil's own luck, a fine carelessness that belied her ruthlessly competitive spirit — but if he wanted to pay her to amuse him, she could do that. It was better than sitting in silence while he ate his bodyweight in buttery pastries whenever he came up against a puzzle that resisted solutions that could be disguised as red herrings.

*

"You're not eating," Mamá says, not even looking up from her crocheting to assess her. She's glad Mamá no longer has to put on that mint-green uniform with a logo of a smiling blonde maid right over her heart and go out and strain her muscles cleaning up strangers' messes, but she hadn't remembered that even the size of Harlan's house wouldn't save her from those eagle eyes.

"That's because there's _nothing_ to _eat_ ," Alice says, holding the fridge and freezer doors open like Moses parting the Red Sea, and Marta can see past her sister's slender shape to the dozens of ingredients awaiting the day they could be of use. "Mommmmmmm." God forbid Alice should make something for herself, Marta thinks, rubbing her temples, soothed by the heat of her fingertips, warmed from clutching a mug of her blood-red tea.

Mamá keeps implacably crocheting instead of sighing or responding, and Alice takes the hint and makes herself a sandwich. "Make your sister one too," Mamá says, but Marta shakes her head. She's tired, not hungry. Out of sorts when she should be on top of the world, now that they'll never have to worry about money again. She misses her job. She misses feeling useful. She misses _Harlan_.

Marta leaves them in the kitchen and takes herself off to the library. Sitting in his big chair, she feels herself enveloped by the upholstery that smells like his cologne and not one of Walt's foul cigars. Harlan had had a foot of height on her, so she has to stretch to reach it, but eventually the old baseball he kept on the desk — in a carved angel's outstretched obsidian arms — is in the cup of her hand. It was Neil's, he'd told her once, the ball from the one perfect game Neil had ever pitched in high school. In their old house, he'd said, Linda had had a whole wall full of debate trophies and commendations, and Walt's binders of grade-school stories took up the better part of a shelf, but Neil's contribution was singular. She doesn't know what it means that it's the only one that Harlan had kept close.

She puts her nose to the ball, wondering if the aroma of grass or the tang of sweat still lingers. There is nothing, but the ritual itself is somehow satisfying, and she curls up in the throne-like chair and clutches the baseball as if it is a talisman, as if she doesn't have a thousand memories of Harlan that don't require the conduit of his dead child, whom she'd never met.

"You're turning into such a weirdo," Alice says, entering with a plate holding a sandwich and a mountain of jalapeño potato chips. She sets the plate down on the desk and steals a chip. "Do you want to talk about it?"

She _would_ , only she's nearly positive that by _it_ , Alice means Ransom's plot and not Harlan himself. That's the _it_ that kept their phones ringing until they dumped them and got new numbers, reporters and acquaintances coming out of the woodwork to learn all their deep thoughts on any number of issues and get a final figure for the massive inheritance that had landed in her lap. That's the _it_ that, she is assured _ad nauseam_ — the phrase jogs her memory, and she recalls fondly that Harlan had said once that no one would ever believe a character with her particular vomit reflex, bemoaning the lost opportunity — would make a great murder mystery all its own. But they don't know, hadn't seen Harlan screwing his courage to the sticking place and drawing the blade unerringly across his throat.

"No," she says, but she smiles up at her sister. "Thank you."

"Just eat, before you get down to my size and start stealing all my clothes," Alice says, as if she's not five endless inches taller. Marta has envied those inches since Alice came into them at age fourteen, a pretty girl turned into a beautiful woman nearly overnight. How little those inches matter now, when being small and plain means she can hide away.

*

"Would you do me a favor, my dear?" Harlan had asked on the first day that there had been too much of a chill in the air for them to sit outside. Fran had been glad of it, tired of having to step so carefully on the loose gravel on the long and winding walk out near the greenhouse with her laden tray. That was what money got you, Marta thought, looking at Harlan's face, both kindly and wily at once: blinders to the inconveniences you got to put others to. The fire roaring behind him hadn't been built by either one of them.

She was curious what he would count as a favor, when he saw so little of the labor that went into making him comfortable. But he was a friend and so she didn't hesitate to give him the answer he wanted. "Yes, of course." A spark of wickedness bubbled up. "But I've told you the secret to winning Go before, every time you've asked. I can't tell you any more simply."

"Listen to the cheek of her," he addressed an invisible audience, an eyebrow arched in surprised delight. "I'll worm the secret of how you cheat out of you yet." The accusing finger he pointed at her was shaking, a little; he was still adjusting to the new medication. "What I wanted to ask you is this: would you read one of my books twice over?"

"Isn't that how mysteries are meant to be read?" she asked, honestly curious. When she'd come home from her first day with Harlan, she'd coasted on a wave of jubilation that was all about her inner bookworm, the old self that she'd put away once Papá was gone and she had to get an after-school job stocking shelves to pay for their groceries. She hadn't been able to keep up with school, work long shifts, _and_ stay up late reading, not after Mamá caught her, and she'd missed losing herself in the written word. "Shouldn't you read it once for the mystery and twice to see the pieces fall into place?"

"The ideal reader is as elusive as the perfect sleuth," Harlan said, a gentle rebuttal, "though I seem to have chanced upon the former twice now." He didn't have to gesture to make his meaning clear, and in any case, all the photographs she'd seen of his late wife were tucked away as if they would retain their power only if not on constant display; more than once she'd seen him start with pleased surprise at finding one tucked between the leaves of a dictionary or almanac. "Would you read the Spanish translation of one of my books and tell me how it stacks up against what I actually wrote?"

Harlan was possessive: not allowing adaptations, _barely_ permitting translations. "Yes, of course." He turned and made a regal gesture at the shelf that held his own clothback first editions. "I think _Drop in the Bucket_ ," she said, aware that she was possibly setting herself up for failure, or at least a fairly thankless task, though it had been one of her favorites when she'd first read it years ago.

"Ah, because of the wordplay! Yes, that should prove most illustrative," Harlan agreed. "English lends itself to puns and paraprosdokians; it is a trickster's language."

She remembered the struggle to switch from Spanish in her everyday life, until one night she dreamt in English and knew she'd left something behind. "And _Drop in the Bucket_ has my favorite detective," she confessed. She'd liked Amina's clear-eyed recognition of how alone she was in her job, and how she braced against the horrors of her life with friends worth keeping.

"She'd have liked you too," Harlan said, and Marta felt as pleased as she'd been when he told her, apropos of nothing, that he liked the way her voice shaped his name.

*

Mamá can afford to go to the dentist now, and Alice, who'd been given a choice of accompanying her or actually clocking in at her job at Macy's, went with her to Dr. Singh's, which means that Marta has the house to herself for once. She still isn't used to the silence, when the house used to hold Fran and Harlan and the dogs at the very least, and usually Greatnana Wanetta too, who'd vanished on Alan Stevens's arm the day that the Norfolk Police Department sent over an entire squad to facilitate the Cabrera move-in (more accurately, to supervise that nothing went missing during the Thrombey move-out, as the Chief of Police knew which side her bread was buttered on). 

She slips out, only remembering at the last second to take the keys, and wanders around the larger-than-life statues Harlan had commissioned to memorialize some of his more fantastic creations.

She's sitting in the cup of the hand of something that looks like a recumbent gargoyle crossed with something out of a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare when Benoit Blanc finds her, all bundled up.

"My, but you're a sight for sore eyes, if I may say so," he says, and she looks up but can see only his piercing eyes and broad smile, peeking out from the hood he has up to shield his head and ears though the wind has died down considerably. His phrasing makes her wonder if he's encountered nothing but unfamiliar faces in the guardhouse, uniforms who hadn't appreciated his evident assurance that he will be welcome on his own word or, failing that, Detective Elliott's, and had to battle his way to her. She smiles, finding the thought of being sought after a nice one, when the seeker is someone she might even count as a friend. At least the dogs, who now stay permanently in the guardhouse since Mamá can't abide animals in the house, would have remembered him.

"You may," she says, hopping up and dusting off her jeans. She sees by the flash of his eyes that he recognizes that she's still wearing the same scarf and jacket. Alice might have gone crazy ordering new clothes, but she hasn't had the heart, not when there is still so much of Harlan's stuff to go through, since it has all — personal and professional, in one undifferentiated mass — been left to her. "Come in for some coffee?"

He acquiesces with a courtly nod and follows her, not taking over when she has difficulty fitting the cold key into the uncooperative lock. He stomps his boots on the mat, ridding them of their detritus of dirt and frost, and follows her example in shucking them off. He looks tired but comfortable in a grey sweater and blue jeans and thick socks, and his ears and the tip of his flat nose are bright pink.

Watching him look around the kitchen with eager interest, Marta feels a little of her happiness at encountering him again seep away, crowded out by guilt that she has no food to offer him. His stomach rumbles then, as if to punctuate what a terrible host she is; all the money in the world and she doesn't even have a can of beans to open for him. His cheeks get a little pinker. "May I sing for my supper?" he asks.

"Help yourself," she says, confused by the smile he shoots her and the way he shakes his head. He inspects the contents of the fridge and deposits bread and eggs and butter on the counter, then spreads his hands out, marveling at the array of copper-bottomed cookware that hangs from hooks. One pan comes down, set on the largest burner, and by the time she turns back from pouring two cups of coffee, her own in a mug that doesn't bear the weight of history, there are four slices of buttered bread being heated in the pan and Blanc is cracking eggs one-handedly and with great panache.

"I can't cook," she confesses, as if he can't deduce that for himself.

"While I have always enjoyed it," he says, as if she has no cause for shame. "Time passes differently for me in a kitchen, and given the fitful and frenetic nature of my work, I find it is often a blessing to be able to spend time in what feels like a leisurely fashion and still have proof of my own productivity. I imagine that a nurse cares less for commanding time than wrangling the lives given into her keeping with every resource she has, and some she must pluck from thin air." His voice — or maybe it's that accent, though self-consciousness about her own means she's far less susceptible than most Americans to them — is so soothing that all on its own it is enough to relax her; when she actually registers what he's saying, her spine basically turns to flan. She is _so tired_ and having a friend reaching out to her feels like what she needs most.

"One-eyed jack, for your delectation," Blanc says, sliding a breakfast plate down to where she's leaning on the counter, watching him work. Against the navy blue of the plate, the fried yolks are almost too perfectly golden to be believed, and the bread is buttery brown. For what feels like the first time since Ransom took her out and fed her not just beans but also a line about his desire to help her, she's actually hungry.

It tastes so good that she nearly misses the pleasures of the textures filling her mouth; the yolk is runny like liquid sunshine, the toast is crisp, and the egg-white is very nearly lacy and yet substantial enough to be pleasantly chewy. "You are a very good cook," she says, mouth still half-full.

"You are far too easy to please," he says, taking a far more delicate bite, but she sees one corner of his mouth tick up, as if he's happy to be the one doing the pleasing.

*

Harlan was having one of his bad days — she knew enough to know it was not the anniversary of any of his tragedies, but a weariness that he couldn't seem to shake was enough to set his temper on edge — when he snapped. She wasn't surprised by the outburst; exhaustion was clinging to him, denying him more than a few hours of sleep each night, but she was taken aback that she was the catalyst, when she was only doing as he asked.

" _I'm_ the original!" he roared, doing his best to loom over her as she read _Una Gota en La Cubeta_. The roar was feeble and he swayed alarmingly above her. "You've gone about this backwards!"

"Hey," she said, with as much calm as she could muster, one finger stuck in the book to keep her place even as she closed the covers, "I _know_ this all came out of your head. Reading the Spanish first means that I can focus on the work the translator did. If I read the English first, all I would be thinking about is how _I_ would translate it."

Abruptly, he lost much of his ire and, she suspected, his energy. Curiosity made him gasp out a question as he sat down with a thump. "Do you still think in Spanish first?"

"Not around you," she said. His color was high and he was shaking a little, but all he really needed was uninterrupted rest. If she could get him to take a nap, he would feel worlds better by the time Fran served dinner. "I'm almost done. If you gave me an hour, I could finish this up and get to the real thing."

He knew she was flattering him with that phrasing, but she knew he could also tell she meant it, so he let it slide. "Well, what have you discovered thus far? Has the wordplay been appalling or merely clumsy?"

"It's not bad, actually. Not quite as light a touch as I remember from the original, and Amina comes across as quick-witted as you wrote her. It's the rest that's different — the narration comes in longer sentences than I remember." She thought about it, trying to dredge up actual memories from ten years ago when she first read _Drop in the Bucket_ , not just the impressions she'd formed of how that book stacked up against his others. "It works, actually, the contrast between the long sentences and the quick dialogue."

Harlan immediately went imperious again, at the very notion that anyone might have changed — or even tried to _improve_ — his work. "Death to semicolons. Sentences should be short, pack a punch. If the narrator is waxing rhapsodic, he is obfuscating, and —" He cut himself off and peered suspiciously at her as he fumbled for his notebook. "That would be an interesting tack to take in the next book. Unsettle the reader who thinks she knows just what she's curling up with, yank the carpet out from under her."

That thought seemed to spark another, and another: a daisy chain of inspiration, going by the length of the note he wrote himself. The very act of writing seemed to settle him, like seeing his own beautiful cursive was enough of a magical charm to banish his anxieties.

"If anyone can pull it off, I'd put my money on you, old man," she said, watching for his absent-minded grin as he concentrated on getting the bones of his new idea down, feeling a flash of triumph when she saw it turn the corners of his mobile mouth up.

*

"I'm stuck," Blanc says as they walk the grounds, both bundled up again. She's already wondering if his skills in the kitchen extend to real hot chocolate, if there's cinnamon in Fran's pantry that he can use to spice it up; she knows there's plenty of pepper, if only because Harlan tipped it over his food with a heavy hand. The snow is getting a little slushy underfoot, and she has to be careful where she steps or her sneakers and socks are going to be soaking before they even get back to the sculpture garden. 

"On a case?" she asks, because for all she knows he's here to talk about his love life.

"Indeed. But my tongue is stopped because I must consider where the boundaries of the burden of confidentiality lie." He turns and looks at her like he's urging her to receive the message he's telepathically sending. She looks back, willing but uncertain, for a long moment, seeing for the first time the ring of navy around the ice-blue irises of his eyes.

"How do you usually get unstuck?" she asks, unsure whether his answer will be something she can provide; he seems so bewildered.

"Please do not consider this a boast," he responds, moving again in the direction she's been leading him, "but I am a virtual stranger to this sticking place."

Just as Harlan's brain could lay out the maze of a plot, with all of its dead ends and one true path shadowed by complications, so Blanc's mind must be able to do the same in reverse, mapping the problem and seeing the route to the solution picked out in light. She doubts he'd call himself an artist, but it's true nevertheless.

He's in the lead and has to turn to ask over his shoulder, "Where are you taking me?" as if he's been trying to catch up to her.

"Here," she says, gesturing at the giant sculptures, arrayed as if they live in this garden. "It's a good place to think."

Blanc gives her a sharply quizzical look, as if to prompt her to share what has necessitated solitary pensiveness on her part, and then tips his head back to look at the pewter-grey sky that looks like a heavy dropcloth. "Not in this weather," he says, before the sky opens and sleet falls out of it.

She runs back to the dry safety of the house, hearing him at her heels, and thinks of what the garden must be like when it's in full bloom, if blossoms insinuate themselves next to monstrous skulls and vines thread through outspread talons. It puts a glow in her chest to think that ensuring she can find out for herself is the very least of what Harlan has done for her.

She's still beaming at the thought when she follows Blanc back into the kitchen, where he bustles about, at ease as if he's at home there, filling Mamá's squat red kettle and setting it on the stove. She weaves around him, heading for the cupboard where she keeps the tea leaves and nodding at the one opposite, so that he's free to choose whichever mug he likes. His hand hovers over Harlan's favorite but then he takes down a pair of brown pottery mugs. Full of blood-red tea, the mugs look like fat, cozy robins.

"Have you seen anything in Harlan's study about an unsolved case in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a little boy's abduction?" he asks, peering suspiciously into his robin's red breast as if nothing that color ought to be called tea. His loss; it's delicious.

"I have sifted through only a fraction of his notes," she says, reminding him that there's no deadline for her to go through what are now her belongings.

"More than thirty years ago, this would have been, Detective Benezet Blanc, lead investigator," he continues, more interested in warming his palms than warming his throat. His big hands look windburned.

"Would you like to look?" she offers. Blanc is a friend, the one who kept her from confessing an imagined crime, even if he is also the one who worked the word _foot_ into nearly every sentence he spoke to her before that, keen to make her stumble over the evidence on her own shoe.

Blanc looks regretful on top and tired underneath. "I'd be wasting my time, as I don't know how Harlan liked to organize his work. I was just hoping you'd seen something and that it'd stuck in your mind." He dredges up a smile to give her. "I do like the way you think."

It's kind of him to say. She smiles back. "I'll look and if I find anything —"

He's quick to pick up what she's hinting at. "You can always call me." She puts her cell in his hand and lets him enter his own number. "It would be nice to hear from you when you've got a mind to talk."

He stands, and she realizes he's readying to leave, despite the sleet and the fact that he looks like what he needs most is a good sleep. She's not sure what Mamá or Alice — who'd looked more than a little piqued when Lieutenant Elliott had kept his attention entirely on Marta — will make of his presence, and so doesn't press him to stay.

He kisses her cheek in farewell under Harlan's watchful painted eyes.

She takes his untouched tea up to Harlan's study and begins combing through his shelves of notebooks. The early ones are more like scrapbooks than anything else, stuffed with newspaper clippings and old photocopies in purple ink. She recognizes the seeds of some of his novels — here's the geographical oddity on which the plot of _The Wrong Tree_ hinged, there's the dockside lingo that poured from the mouths of the seamier characters from _Vulcan's Den_ — but nothing from Louisiana pops up.

She's on the third randomly selected notebook, sleeker than the others, with only Harlan's beautiful script marking its pages, when she sees a photograph stuck between its leaves. It's a boy, maybe sixteen, and she recognizes Harlan's cheekbones and his wife's sparkling eyes in the young face that grins out at her. This must be Neil.

That picture is only the first. Threaded all through the notebook in which Harlan worked out _Nick of Time_ are pictures of Neil: wearing a baseball glove, frowning down at a sketchpad, blowing out candles on a cake. There's one of him in a bulky sweater that she gasps over, seeing how much Ransom resembles him.

She pulls _Nick of Time_ down from the shelf, deciding to make that her next read.

*

She's not quite ready to talk, but she's duty-bound to tell Blanc what she found. She texts him: _Nothing about an abducted boy or your father, but one of the books (The Needle Game) has a subplot about a child believed to be kidnapped or murdered who's found decades later in a well._

 _Hell's bells, we have wells round here_ he writes back not long after. She waits, but nothing else comes.

She goes back to sifting through Harlan's papers, taken aback when she sees her own name in dark, emphatic capitals on a calendar, marking her first day on the job. She doesn't figure in any of the notebooks — Harlan seems to have shied away from fictionalizing those he knew personally — but she finds notes that she wrote him tucked away like they're precious. They're nothing momentous or personal, just reminders of when to take new pills or grocery lists he insisted on dictating to her.

He loved her, Harlan did, and she'd loved him. It's there in every aching beat of her heart as she sits in the space they once shared.

In the end, Harlan didn't let her down — even when he thought she'd killed him in her carelessness, his last thought was to save her from her own folly, to love her steadily enough to accept that her hands had taken his life. She traces his elegant script with a soft fingertip, drawing ghosts of his words from that last night, his last birthday, when he'd taken notes on his own supposed poisoning. His trust, his willingness to give the life he'd loved for her safety, is the biggest gift he could have given, but he was unstinting and had left her not the ashes of that life but its unbounded promise as well. It's up to her now to figure out what to do with all of it.

She gathers up her stone-cold mug and heads for the kitchen. She thinks she can handle making one-eyed jack, with plenty of pepper.


End file.
